Digital and Online Marketing Musings. Good, bad and ugly.

Tag Archives: agency

I am very lucky to have seen the media world from various angles; working for over a decade in media sales starting with computer magazines through to digital display, affiliate and email; then spending 7 years planning and buying online media at agencies, and finally ending up where I am now, doing digital marketing contracts within client organisations.

The journey has taken me a long time, but as a result I now have some pretty good insights into why you should or shouldn’t use an agency and also what it’s like to walk in the shoes of those involved.

My main take out has been that we will all do our jobs better if we understand more about the context in which our internal and external partners work; and it is for this reason that I’ve previously summarised The Top 5 tips for Selling Media to Agencies. To continue with the theme, with a few more months experience working client side, today I give you The Top 5 Agency Tips to Keeping A Client Happy.

1) Find out what it is they’re judged on

Each time you take on a new client, a new product or campaign within an organisation, your most important priority is to set the goalposts. There is no point working painstakingly for weeks on a campaign that builds reach and frequency if the client (or the client’s boss) is only going to ask “How many sales did we make?”. Similarly if you are able to report on digital sales only, but don’t get to see offline or unattributed sales fluctuations you may be seriously hampering your campaign’s performance and under or over reporting the impact it has on the client’s bottom line.

And the bottom line is always the bottom line. I have yet to find a client who doesn’t end by judging their media by the financial impact it has, nomatter how much they say they want to be innovative and “go beyond the banner” and have cut through and win awards. It’s money, plain and simple.

You can make your life even easier by putting this one figure at the top of your report each day/week/month. Why make the client scroll through lines of data when the only figure their boss asks is “Are we up or down?”. Give them that figure at the top, big and bold with context (week on week, month on month, year on year), and then explain more later. Don’t make them search for it.

2) Pro-actively send them information

I know only too well about the resource pressures within an agency environment, but

if your job is to provide the client report on Monday by 10 O’clock, DO IT!

Don’t wait till they natter, don’t think you’ve got a few hours leeway if they don’t seem to have noticed. That time will have been set for a reason – they may have a sales or board meeting at 11 where they will be asked about the figures. If they’ve been stuck in another meeting until then, and are relying on you to have sent the data through so they can access it on the fly, do you want to be the person who makes them look stupid in front of their board?

If there are operational reasons why it’s difficult to get the data to them at that time – the ad server hasn’t updated sales, the report is bespoke and complex and can’t be done that quickly – then sit down with them and ask them what they can get away with. Many a time I have sent a client simple preliminary data (with caveats) only to follow up later with more mature data with a full analysis. Believe me, when the report lands in their inbox your client will breathe a sigh of relief because NOMATTER WHAT IT SAYS, some data is better than radio silence.

Resource pressures allowing, try to always give them more information that the basic SLA states. If you show interest in their business and show examples of something relevant that another client has done, some media developments as a stimulus or do a bit of extra digging in competitor trends for some context, they will be nothing but happy. This point really matters when the client comes up for pitch, as you can guarantee that the other agencies will throw all sorts of innovative solutions at them to show the difference they can make, and the last thing you want is “Well, we stopped sending you ideas as you always said No.” to be your excuse when they mark you down and you lose the pitch on innovation.

3) Don’t insult their decisions

I’ve said this before (here) and I’ll say it again – they may have access to information that you don’t have. So…

EVEN IF THEY SEEM TO BE TOTALLY INSANE do not insult the decisions they make.

By all means ask questions about them, state (politely) why you may have done things differently and make caveats in your forecasts where you think these decisions will impact negatively on the performance metrics that you can see, but it is the height of arrogance to assume that you know their business better than them. You may know media, you may know how to get people to their website, but you are probably not seeing a whole pile of data that gives an entirely different context to performance.

An example of this is using ad server/search tool data as gospel. Recently I had to stop an agency from continually over optimising an account, reducing potential lead volumes based on AdWords data, when the data of record for the company was the Google Analytics integrated search CPA, which was much healthier and meant that rather than reducing spend/bids, they could have been a lot braver.

Had they been given access to the data? Yes.

Did they bother looking? No.

Did they send a report that criticised my decisions based on their incomplete data? Yes.

Will they remain our supplier for long? No.

4) Find a positive in everything

Sometimes things go wrong in business and marketing. Products fail or get bad PR, messaging doesn’t create any impact, a competitor launches a spoiler. Recessions happen. Sometimes it’s the media choices, season, targeting or forecasting. Sometimes you just don’t know. But there is ALWAYS something you can learn from a campaign. Even if that thing is “We won’t do it again in that way”.

There is nothing more depressing for a client to receive (or, I imagine, an agency account manager to write) than a post-campaign report where the results have fallen far short of the forecast or target, especially if there’s no obvious explanation; but you can rescue the wreckage by highlighting ways that other clients have improved things when faced with a seemingly dismal failure. One way to change the way you put things in context is to always to have 10% of your budget allocated to testing new things (especially in the ever changing digital world). This means that any test that fails is not seen as the end of the world, and instead a fundamental part of the development process.

If you call it a test and it fails, it’s a learning.

If you call it a plan and it fails, it’s failure.

I know which one I’d be happier to discuss with my client/boss.

5) Tell them the “So what?”

Data. We’re all drowning in it. And the data you send to your client will be only a tiny part of the data they see each day.

Digital media’s very trackability is the reason it remains the healthiest part of the advertising market (granted, it is also a stick with which it can be beaten). The result of all this data can be inertia as we all struggle to put it into context and gain anything actionable. This is where you can make your client look like a superstar.

Here’s some online sales data. I’ve graphed it as a monthly trend. It still means nothing unless I know how it compares to

other companies doing the same thing

seasonality expectations

my own company/product performance in the past

my forecasts and targets

Good or bad are all relative concepts, and it is your job to take your client from data driven inertia to the “So what?” – think about what it means. How different is it to what you expected – AND WHAT DO YOU RECOMMEND THEY DO ABOUT IT NOW?

Give them potential actions to take to their boss, even extreme ones to get them thinking.

Do they choose between:

cancel the project

change the creative

recall the product

change the media mix

add international markets

double the spend

change the landing page

expand the product range

add a phone number

For every campaign learning, there should be a recommendation that the business can do to either capitalise on it, or avoid it in the future. State these and give your client an action plan to test these new recommendations (remember, tests don’t fail, they become learnings), and then you have a process of constant testing and learn, that WILL lead to success over time.

This week one of my old clients, Direct Line, announced that it was setting up an in house agency. Apart from wincing on behalf of the incumbent MediaCom (and the amazing team I worked with who ran their paid search) this is a reflection of a lot of soul searching in the marketplace – and the question that I’ve been asked a lot in the last few months, namely “Would you recommend running digital marketing in house or through an agency?” – to which I don’t think there is a perfect answer.

Agency Pros.

The biggest benefit of using an agency is the flexibility and scalability to get things done. A dedicated team of experts, learning from a larger pool who work across various markets and hence can apply learnings quickly and easily, and hopefully avoid repeating the same mistakes or re-inventing the wheel for each individual client.

In addition to this there is a reduced staff overhead and capital expenditure to service marketing campaigns and plans that may not be always on, or to the same level – and therefore would entail a constantly fluctuating need for staff and possibly office space.

Traditionally the buying power of agencies has been seen as a major benefit but this is increasingly irrelevant in a growing digital world. Yes I’m sure the clout of the big agency networks still carries weight with TV and large print publishers, but there is only so much volume an agency can guarantee to secure the best rates without locking their clients into inappropriate media choices.

Digital media runs overwhelmingly on performance based buying models, either as a CPC/CPA. Even a low CPM buy only remains justified as long as the “effective CPA” formula works out at the back end. This means that the perceived value of the media is out of the hands of the media owner, and the old sales negotiation model is defunct.

The increasing combinations of media, client and social interaction data that enables Real Time Bidding mean that in theory any agency, technology or platform partner can and does engage in arbitrage through buying cheap network and exchange inventory, adding value with layers of data and selling on to the advertiser at whatever they can get away with.

As long as the client gets the customers they want at a rate that makes sense for their profit margins, this may seem fair, but when part of the cost they pay is driven by their own data, one could very rightly say that they should not be paying this premium, except maybe for the usage of the technology that enables it.

The elephant in the room

The agency world is a scary place to be right now. Recession has brought increasing pressure on client margins, meaning marketers and procurement departments are constantly picking away at agency fees – demanding more for the same fees, or indeed lower; with the constant threat of pitches used to keep the agency in line.

Agency fees are being pushed lower through supply and demand, and they race to economise and automate to make the figures add up. Meanwhile, (like the proverbial swan on the water with madly flapping legs) operational staff are running just to keep still, keeping abreast of all the changes in digital that mean entire tracking and attribution models are rewritten each year; new media, channels and delivery mechanisms are added monthly and still the ROI machine says:

MORE MORE MORE!

CHEAPER CHEAPER CHEAPER!

The nature of a market reducing fees and profitability even while it becomes more complicated and labour intensive is guaranteed to create pain for the people on the front line. It undermines agencies’ ability to invest in systems and procedures that would enable efficiencies, and inevitably means that mistakes are made, clients don’t get what they need and eventually the dreaded pitch becomes reality after all.

So the account goes to another agency, and the process begins again.

It’s painful, it’s bad business for both parties but it’s almost impossible to stop. Without a wholesale re-think of agency fees, values and expectations the impact of digital has been to make it harder to service clients profitably, just at a time when they need the most expertise. Not surprising then that they’re thinking about setting up their own talent pool.

In House Pros.

Outsourcing, silos and business change: The marketing world has always had to adapt as the consumer changes, and now that process is faster than ever. The ways that the consumer has changed now impacts more than just how you market to them. It’s how you sell, how you transact, your channel to market and how you follow up, it’s customer service, complaints, reviews and approval and advocacy and sharing. Every touchpoint is now possible across a variety of devices – and worse – bad experiences can be shared to the point of going viral worldwide in minutes, potentially destroying years of product development and business planning (Dasani in the UK, anyone?)

What this means is that the entire business often needs to change, sometimes radically, to adapt to consumer preferences. How fundamental this change needs to be can be masked if your comms are handled by external partners, plus also de-skilling your own internal staff.

Multiple teams within an agency, multiple agencies dealing with multiple product, marketing and discipline teams within a client means that the helicopter view that says “Whoa, we really need to change this!” gets missed, and each part of the machine keeps working to its own disparate aims without a central unifying mission or understanding.

Of course this can happen within an organisation too, it is not restricted to services that are outsourced, but you can guarantee that more disparate entities involved in something, the more difficult it is to integrate.

Data, data and more data: In a perfect world all marketers would have robust MI data that truly reflects the impact of their activities. By this I mean more than just to initial sale, but attrition and lifetime value metrics that can hugely impact the ROI of marketing. Too often it isn’t shared either internally or with stakeholders such as agencies – sometimes through politics or negotiation tactics; and often just because it’s a headache to export and see in any meaningful way even internally. My point is that the more actionable data we all have, internal or external the better job we can all do.

So the answer seems to be that whether internal or external, the most important issue is about integration and data, and having a digital leader that understands the nitty gritty, but is also able to capture the big picture and translate it into business actions.

Good agency staff care as much about your business success as you do; good marketers know that a customers’ interactions are a function of more than just the media plan.

It turns out that good business people are good business people wherever they work, so if you find the right person – keep that person – wherever they are.

It is a universal belief in media negotiation that the other participant is, frankly, a bit stupid. The adversarial nature of so many negotiations leads to sales people assuming that agencies are blind to the true (brilliant) nature of the media they’re buying; and agencies’ assuming that sales people are all money grabbing liars who would sell their own mother for a few quid and a free jolly.

Having sat on both sides of the fence I now believe that most misunderstandings are due to context; exacerbated by the poor agency sod never having the time to truly get to know the media marketplace and enjoy the negotiation process. I’ve seen many buyers make bad choices and salespeople lose out because one or other of them doesn’t understand where the other, or the client is coming from, so I’ve attempted to dispel a few myths.

All this of course may be academic in a few years when all media is digitised and bought through Real Time Bidding, but in the meantime let’s all enjoy the process a bit more.

1) Don’t pile on the pressure.

I have heard media sales training sessions where the trainer has said, without irony, “If the client/agency is still saying no, they obviously still don’t have enough information.”. Quite apart from the potential damage that could result from harassing the media buyer until they are backed into a corner, the arrogance of this view appals me. There are definitely varying levels of knowledge amongst sales, agency and client staff; but there is always the possibility that these people have access to more/different information than you have, which may not be shareable and may in fact make their decision a stroke of genius. Either way, pressure sales techniques almost always backfire in business relationships where you hope or expect to speak to them again. I have seen media buyers refuse to pick up the phone to certain sales people as they’re actually quite scared of them, or advise their colleagues not to do business with them either due to their approach. Be gentle, and if necessary sacrifice the one sale for the longer term view.

2) Be generous with information

Having said all of the above, there will definitely be pieces of information to which you have access, that the media planner/buyer may not have seen or had the time to hunt out. Sharing things that make them understand your market/product better regularly – not just when you’re in the midst of a negotiation, is a great way to both be appreciated and to be seen as an expert. This applies even more to competitor information that their client may love to see. Any interesting snippets about other clients in the same sector where they’ve tried something and had a great success is always worth sharing (with as much proof of results as you can legally share), as this will almost always be shared directly with the client and get you further to the top of mind.

3) Answer the brief

I cannot name the number of times when I have shared a detailed brief with a short-list of media owners, with quite specific needs, only to be disappointed. In my experience the vast majority do not answer the actual brief, instead either sending a re-purposed sales PowerPoint with the client’s logo pasted in (and sometimes not editing the text to ensure that the rest of it doesn’t mention the previous client it was sent to); or maybe sending over a proposal which clearly misses the cost or performance criteria with a weak “Well if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.” pitch, with no clear evidence of why the agency should risk their reputation on recommending this buy.

I cannot state too clearly – read the brief and answer the question, with just one sentence if necessary. If it is impossible to make the metrics/target work – say so, and say so early. This will save you both time and mean you get another crack at another campaign that may have different criteria, and a reputation for being honest, which is always a good thing in an incestuous industry.

4) Put your best foot forward – immediately.

Many times I have spoken to media buyers to tell them that they have not been chosen for a particular campaign, only for them to say “Oh, well if you’d told me, we could have matched those rates.” This is negotiation suicide. Basically the days of agencies having plenty of time to ring you back, negotiate rates gradually down and then eventually settle on something are well past. If you don’t put your “walk away” rates down at the very beginning (which other people will) you risk immediately being excluded, and by the time you speak to the buyer again the decision will already have been made and it’ll be too late for you to pull something out of the bag. Clearly going back with a very low rate every time isn’t healthy for your business, so the important part is packaging your rates correctly. By all means respond with a menu of options – one of which is rock bottom, but in offering these rates you are clear that the sacrifice will be in terms of the quality/data/visibility, and always have other options for the buyer to choose from. If they don’t see it, they can’t sell it to their client either. Tell them which is your favoured option, and why it is so much better for the client. Give it wings so that it’s hard for them to refuse. Even if the first client doesn’t like it or simply doesn’t have the budget, it may just get re-sent to their next client as an option.

5) Save the expenses for people you’re already doing business with

If you’re busy and stressed, the thought of having to make small talk with a random 23 year old who’ll try to sell to you for an hour and a half is not appealing. Even if it is at the poshest restaurant in town. Building business relationships absolutely makes sense, but save the jollies for after you’ve built a working relationship. The only time you should invite someone you don’t yet know is to something that’s useful to them and will make them better at their job – normally an educational seminar or large networking event with multiple people. One to one jollies are for the people who you are thanking or building something with, not a way in.